Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture

Thomas C. Oden
General Editor

Oden is Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at The Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He is general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and the author of numerous theological works, including a three-volume systematic theology.

An Interview with Thomas C. Oden
General Editor, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture

Conducted by Dan Reid
InterVarsity Press Senior Editor, Reference & Academic Books

REID: How did the idea for the ACCS arise?

ODEN: I think it came to me when I was preparing a sermon on a text. I suddenly realized that what I had been doing as a theologian could be applied to preaching--that it would be possible to go back to the Fathers of the Church series, look up the Scripture reference and find all kinds of material for that particular text. So that was an "Aha!" experience for me.

REID: What confirmed in your mind that you should proceed with the project?

ODEN: I believe it did not come until the Washington, D.C., feasibility consultation in December 1993. The project had been brewing in my mind for several years, my Ph.D. students were excited about it, and I wanted to gather together the best people I could think of and ask whether it could and should be done, and whether we had the resources to carry it out. Drew University brought together top patristic scholars from around the country. We seriously evaluated the positives and negatives, and there grew out of that body a strong consensus that this was something we could and should do.

REID: There has been a considerable amount of prepublication enthusiasm for the ACCS. Do you think the time is particularly ripe for the project?

ODEN: Almost everyone I talk with about the project responds positively, wondering why this was not done fifty years ago or more. I do think this is a ripe time among the several different audiences--Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant evangelical--and for different reasons.

Among Roman Catholics there has been since Vatican II a fixation on the documents of Vatican II, so much so that they have tended to forget their patristic grounding. If you go back to Roman Catholic scholarship of fifty and one hundred years ago, you will see constant reference to patristic writers. Now, I'm very pleased with much that Vatican II did, but I think that they have tended during this period of opening the windows to the modern world--aggiornamento--to lose something of their exegetical roots.

The Orthodox have always been committed to patristic exegesis, but they have generally focused on Eastern exegesis. They've had such riches in the Eastern tradition that they have not felt a need to go into Western tradition. I think there is a growing awareness of the Western tradition on the part of the Orthodox, and they are ready to look further into the history of exegesis.

Evangelicals have entered into the world of historical-critical scholarship in a fairly healthy way, but it has left them hungry, with a sense of something essential missing. I think there is a growing awareness among them that the work of the Holy Spirit in the period between Augustine and Luther, and even before Augustine, in the Eastern tradition, is largely a closed memory.

Among each of these three audiences, there is a hunger regarding a long-delayed project that has not matured. The resources for doing scholarly work in this area have diminished greatly in the last two centuries, and that is part of the reason why there is a readiness for this project.

REID: I have heard you make some critical comments regarding modern biblical interpretation of Scripture. What do you think has gone wrong in biblical interpretation that needs to be set right?

ODEN: The heart of the answer is an ideological captivity to the assumptions of the Enlightenment. By those assumptions I mean naturalistic reductionism, autonomous individualism, hedonic narcissism and absolute relativism. These describe the two-century hegemony of the ideology of modernity. And there is an inordinate dependence of historical-critical scholarship on that ideology.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when I was a young theologian and a Bultmannian, it seemed like the assumptions of modernity would go on forever. But the worldview of modernity is now suffering an intense inward collapse. I strongly commend historical scholarship. But I would argue that a great deal of modern biblical scholarship needs to be freed from the narrow assumptions of modernity.

REID: The ACCS is not aimed primarily at the guild of biblical scholarship, but how do you hope it will be used and perceived by biblical scholars?

ODEN: I think it is targeted to some of the guild of biblical scholars, especially those who have experienced the demoralization of contemporary ideology-bound historical scholarship. I think the guild is already becoming aware of the vulnerability of its own assumptions. And, in that sense, the ACCS is pertinent to the crisis faced by the guild. Many scholars who have faithfully come through the way biblical studies has been taught over the past forty or fifty years are now ready to delve into the history of exegesis, which has been not only largely inaccessible to them but systematically excluded from them. In other words, most biblical scholars wouldn't think of going back to Origen or Theodore of Mopsuestia or Theodoret--that would never occur to them if they were exegeting a difficult passage, say on Luke. Their training has provided them with the assumption that the modern historical-critical method is all they need in order to properly exegete the text. So I believe there are lots of scholars who are ready for some fresh air from the history of exegesis. They really haven't had a chance at it yet because the texts have not been available to them, at least not in an easily accessible form.

REID: Not having done any serious work in patristics myself, I have been struck by the fact that a good deal of material that exists in line-by-line patristic commentaries is not available in English translation. How much exegetical material would you say has not previously been brought into English in any form?

ODEN: A lot of this is just sitting in Latin and Greek. It's there in the Migne patrology. There are very important commentaries, or at least extracts of commentaries, by, for example, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret, as well as huge amounts of Cyril of Alexandria, that remain untranslated. And there are many minor Latin authors and significant line-by-line commentaries that have remained untranslated. There is a German translation, Pauluskommentare aus der griechischen Kirche (Pauline Commentary from the Greek Church&), published in 1933 by Staab, that has commentaries or segments by Didymus the Blind, Eusebius of Emesa, Severian of Gabala, Gennadius of Constantinople, Acacius of Caesarea, Apollinaris of Laodicea. This was never translated into English, but in Gerald Bray's ACCS volume on Romans, for example, significant portions of this material will be available in English.

Exactly how much material remains untranslated? One way to answer that is to look at the 379 volumes of the Migne Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina and ask what proportion of the biblical comment in those volumes is translated into English. I believe it would be less than half of the total. If we ask about translation into other modern languages, I imagine 60 or 70 percent, maybe 75 percent, has been translated.

REID: I can distinctly remember in my first year of seminary being attracted by the catalog write-up of a graduate-level course called something like "Historical Exegesis of Scripture." It promised to explore ways of utilizing patristic exegesis. However, in the years that followed, I never had any significant encounter with patristic exegesis, and that included a few years of graduate work in biblical studies. Perhaps I should not have transferred to another seminary! But now I'm glad for the present opportunity as an editor to be taking the course. How would you advise those who hold the keys to seminary curricula to remedy this matter? Already the three-year curriculum is chock-full, isn't it?

ODEN: Remedying the deficiencies of seminary curricula is a difficult question because of all kinds of vested political interests long at work in the building of any curriculum. But I think the most promising answer is to begin to include patristic studies and patristic exegesis in courses in pastoral care, in ethics, in homiletics, and not simply to rely on the historians and the biblical scholars to make these resources available.

I think there are an increasing number of people teaching in pastoral care, for example, who are beginning to realize that there is a great viable tradition of therapeutic wisdom in the classical tradition. Similarly, with respect to ethics, the moral teachings of the ancient Christian writers are being rediscovered gradually. I think the ACCS volumes will be used in homiletics courses. I think they will also enter into the study of questions of ethics with regard to particular passages that pose questions of moral responsibility and social justice. So I believe our project is going to have an impact on curricula, but it will be very incremental, very slow. Maybe, twenty or thirty years from, now there will be in biblical studies a normative assumption that if you are going to study Romans or Genesis, you've got to study the history of exegesis of these books.

REID: I have been impressed lately by the fact that the Reformers were very conversant with patristic interpretation and obviously prized patristic insight for their own exegesis. Where or when, in Protestant interpretation, did patristic interpretation fall into neglect?

ODEN: It was well intact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If you look at Luther's knowledge of Augustine, Calvin's knowledge of Ambrose, Bucer or Melancthon's knowledge of the ancient Christian writers, you will see that they were very solidly rooted, particularly in the Western patristic writers. In the seventeenth century you even see a deepening of that interest in the fathers on the part of Lutheran and Reformed Protestant scholastics, as they are sometimes called. And you can see it in Puritan writers like John Owen or Richard Baxter. By the eighteenth century there still was significant patristic scholarship, since scholars then still knew how to read Greek and Latin.

But, in the nineteenth century, as the Protestant intellectual tradition became more liberalized, it became less capable of even reading the Greek and Latin sources. I track this beginning with Schleiermacher, Strauss and Hegel--I think the fall of Protestant hermeneutics goes through that sequence. Our ability to read, understand and appreciate patristic writers fell into neglect to the extent that we fell into the Hegelian assumption of progress in history–which gave a glow to modern ideology--and Schleiermacher's focus on individual religious experience and the assumption of Strauss and others on objective historical knowledge as the important aspect of historical inquiry.

REID: As I have read the manuscripts of these initial volumes, I have envisioned the setting of Bill Moyer's recent PBS series on Genesis. There intellectuals from a variety of perspectives would gather to talk about a text from Genesis. I see a parallel thing happening in these commentaries, though all within the ambit of consensual Christianity. I envision the fathers gathered in a circle commenting on a text from Mark or Romans. An engaging Bible study ensues in which not every comment is of equal value to me. But through the whole conversation, new and unexpected vistas on the whole of Scripture unfold. And the entire conversation raises my perception of the text to a level greater than the sum of its parts.

ODEN: Yes, as I look at the patristic comments, not all are of equal value to me either, nor do I think they have been of equal value in the historical tradition. Some have been historically more central than others.

I think from your analogy we can observe that there are great varieties of interpretation that are indeed shaped by various cultural challenges and situations. Under the umbrella of orthodoxy, of ecumenical consent, there is still a great deal of room for many varieties of interpretation. There is not simply one way of reading a text, and of reading it authentically within the frame of the mind of the believing church. So one thing we learn from the patristic writers who span over seven centuries is that there can be--without heresy--honestly different approaches, methods and metaphors that can be drawn out from or applied to a particular Scripture text.

The other thing I want to pick up on is this wholeness idea that you have mentioned. Classical Christian tradition wants to read each text according to the whole. Katholou, "according to the whole," from which we get our word "catholic," carries with it the idea of seeing that text in relation to all other texts and the whole experience of the Christian community. For evangelicals a truly catholic reading of Scripture is a reading carried out with the mind of the early church. We have a very bad Protestant habit of assuming that I take my Bible into my closet, and it is just between me and God, and nobody else. And I don't have to listen to any other voices.

One of the reasons for the hunger in Protestant hermeneutics is precisely this, that we have missed the correctives of other voices--of other historical periods and cultures. Part of what we are doing when we read Scripture with the fathers is expanding our cultural vision, the metaphors through which we can understand the Scripture text. We are also seeing the text more according to its wholeness, that is according to the wholeness of the truth of the Christian faith and of Scripture. To see how the Holy Spirit has worked through that wholeness is one of the great gifts that comes from this kind of exercise.

This part of my life is devoted to enjoying that great conversation, sharing in it and mediating it to colleagues in the modern period. And I must say it's a profound privilege to be able to sit at that table.